Avraham Adan

Avraham Adan was born in 1926 in Kfar Giladi

Adan was born in 1926 in Kfar Giladi under the surname Eidelson, which he later changed to Adan. He went to Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv. In 1943 he joined the Palmach, where he got the nickname Bren after the Bren machine gun.

In the 1948 war he was a company commander in the Negev Brigade. During Operation Uvda his company reached Umm al-Rashrash, now Eilat. He was photographed there raising the Ink Flag as the war ended.

In 1949 he moved to the Armored Corps and founded the first Sherman tank unit of the IDF. In the 1956 Sinai campaign he commanded the 82nd Battalion, and in 1961 he took command of the 7th Brigade. In 1967 he was deputy commander of the 31st Division, and in March 1969 he became a major general and head of the Armored Corps.

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War he commanded the 162nd Division in Sinai, which took heavy losses in the counterattack of 8 October. His division later crossed the Suez Canal and advanced to encircle the Egyptian Third Army, and its entry into Suez City led to heavy losses and criticism. He then headed Southern Command from January to July 1974 and served as the IDF attaché in the United States from 1974 to 1977.

From 1984 to 1993 he was the ombudsman of the Police Ministry. He wrote books on the 1973 war and the 1948 war, and later documented the history of the Palmach. He died in 2012 at his home in Ramat HaSharon and was buried at Kibbutz Shefayim.